New Moon: A Critical Review
by veebeejustte
Summary: MY review of New Moon; you can flame if you'd like. One-shot.


New Moon by Stephanie Meyer

Critique; Argumentative approach (With What I Hope Is Not Too Much Humor)

Truthfully, I liked the Twilight saga a lot in third grade. The first time, though I only got about ten percent of the actual detail, I loved the amount of reading material and the fact that there were vampires and werewolves. Nearly six years later, I decided that since the series had gotten so many reviews from teenagers (both good and bad) I would reread the series to see what the big deal was about. So I took time off of my normal reading list (which currently consists of absolutely no teen fiction) to read the teenaged vampire drama story again. I would like to show you just how horrible the series is through the worst of the four, New Moon.

The book starts the same way every Twilight series book does: a Bella rant. In its predecessor, Bella rants about moving to Washington; in this it's about her birthday, her eighteenth birthday to be exact. You see, her super-sparkly immortal vampire boyfriend (that would be Edward Cullen) is only seventeen and will remain seventeen forever. Bella is paranoid that she will keep aging forever whilst her best friends (all of which are vampires, of course) stay the same age. So, naturally, she asks everyone not to celebrate her birthday, and, naturally, no one listens. She gets a number of birthday presents that anyone in their right mind would be thankful for, but she goes on and on about how she doesn't want to be reminded of the fact that she is eighteen and her boyfriend is seventeen, pretty much the lamest, most melodramatic reason to get upset on the planet. Then, after five chapters or so, the real plot commences.

Our favorite melancholy, klutzy teenager- er, young adult- and her boyfriend are walking in the woods one day when Edward decides to break the news that he's moving. Worst part? She's the reason behind it. He starts spieling about how 'dangerous' he is and some other things that are far too dramatic/ romantic for me to care about summarizing. He says he'll never come back and Bella is left alone in the woods crying. Oh, what a nice boyfriend he is! If only he saw how bad things got after he left.

The next three chapters consist of only a title. Because summarizing this is physically impossible, I'll just give them to you: November, December, and January. A little pointless in my opinion. Personally, I think the author could easily have just began the next chapter with something like "Three months later..." and forgone the waste of paper and harm to the environment. Too bad. But of course, this waste of time and money shies in comparison to Bella's next endeavor: she falls in love. That's right, she meets a guy named Jacob and totally ditches Edward for him. At first she uses him to explicitly break her father's rules; she has him fix a run-down motorbike. Then she continues to ride it and nearly kill herself. Then her new best friend and crush turns into a werewolf. A werewolf. I mean, how likely is it that she falls in love with two supernatural creatures in one year in the same place? But with all that aside, let us continue with her stupidity.

One day, she sees Jacob and his werewolf friends going cliff-diving and decides to try it herself, despite the poor logic of it. Think, a rather weak and clumsy girl plunging from more than fifty feet in the air into a twenty-foot deep lake in early spring in the rainiest town in the world. Not smart. Of course, she gets saved by her friend the topless muscular wolf. He then does the only somewhat smart thing in the whole book- he tells Bella how stupid she was for engaging in such an ill-advised activity! Sadly, despite this one pro to Jacob, this does not outweigh his major con- he's a horrible example. He says it's a bad idea to do something and continues to do it himself. But as you see, this doesn't matter when the climax comes.

Bella's vampire friend Alice (who is psychic, of course) comes to her house and says that she saw her jumping off a cliff and dying (you see, something odd about Alice's powers. They just happen not to work on werewolves- how convenient. So she saw Bella dying rather than being saved by a werewolf.) She makes sure to add that Bella smells like dog- a result of being around a werewolf. And then Alice brings even more bad news: Edward is going to commit suicide because he thinks Bella is dead and because he is just like Romeo. Seriously, this story is so much like Romeo and Juliet it's hilarious. Then they go to Italy (where Edward will to commit suicide via publicizing his super-sparkly oddities and getting executed by the police of vampires, the Volturi) and save him. The story ends with Jacob going all melodramatic and running off as a wolf because Bella ditched him for her original love who she had already ditched (wow, that was a touch confusing), where Eclipse will immediately pick up.

As you can see, this story is absolutely ridiculous. The characters are unrealistic, the plot is impossible, and the stylistic choices (see the three chapters with no content whatsoever) are just a waste of time. The story I thought was pretty cool at eight is now a mockery of all supernatural fiction everywhere. And the romance, don't get me started on it. Try choosing between a glitter-glue vampire who drinks animal blood (wimp! Come on, real vampires drink human blood!) and a sharp-tempered, mangy mutt who will lead you to certain death via motorcycles and cliff-diving. On second thought, don't. It' a good way to get a headache. I can't imagine how the Stephanie Meyer got through this story. Obviously, the correct side of this war is the anti-Twilight side, as I hope I have proved to you. Beware the Twilight saga (especially New Moon) at all costs.


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